Teaching expertise, like anything else, takes a lot of hard work and practice to develop. But what teachers are working at and what they are developing is not always commonly understood. Teachers and teacher educators often do what they know and over time hone their abilities, routines, and decision-making to elevate student thinking and learning. Their knowledge and practice-base are likely informed through their own trial and error, interactions with peers, and to a lesser extent through professional learning opportunities; leaving much to chance. Ostensibly, the reliance on one’s own experiences and the experiences of neighbors could be limited, and teacher and teacher-educator practice could benefit from informative academic research.
The research landscape for South Asia has been changing over the last few decades. As efforts to improve students’ learning and the teaching that supports it are better understood and dealt with, the barriers to improvement decrease, in large part because the individualistic manner of knowing what it takes to do the work of teaching has been replaced with stronger common understandings and activities: ones that are based in and for practice. In our reading and preparation for this book though, we struggled to find even a few narratives that grappled with what it takes to pull off the work of teaching and teacher education in the region.
As we set out to build this book, our premise was to raise two questions within our communities: Can we afford to let educational practice be guided by hunches and hopes? And, what might their academic reports look like if the primary focus was on practices and the secondary focus accounted for aims and ambitions, environment and context, policies and programs? In essence, we asked authors to foreground practice and push to the background all the rest. We did this because our contention is that oftentimes aims are so ambiguous and context so dependent that they cloud. Implementation is regularly up to local discretion and available capabilities, and to move away from the problem of vagueness, we felt a radical departure toward practices might help authors and readers alike better understand teaching and subsequently learning in South Asia. We debated whether such a path would help us actually see the strong and salient instruments that are being created and deployed that teacher educators, teachers, and students are actually using to advance learning. We weren’t sure. In short, though, we wanted to make use of and showcase whatever assets we could uncover.
What we found was that even in 2019 many practitioners are still not versed in basic teaching practices or even teaching moves. This seems to be the case, in spite of many having passed out of degree programs, or having attended teacher training programs. Fundamentals such as, ways to give instructions, ways to move in the classroom, ways to write on the board, wait-time, and ways to distribute materials are not part of what teachers know to do. The view that there are implications layered into these choices, or even that there are choices, remains unrecognized. And promising practices such as, leading group discussions, setting up and orchestrating small group work, providing oral and written feedback, reinforcing positive student behavior, diagnosing common patterns of student thinking, and posing questions in order to elicit student thinking, are even farther out on the horizon. As Herbert Simon, Victor A. Thompson, and Donald W. Smithburg (1950) wrote, “If the people do not know what they are supposed to do, they cannot do it” (Simon et al., p. 415).
Government school teaching in South Asia in the early 2000s was found to be lacking (Dyer et al., 2004; Mukunda, 2009; Ramachandran, Pal, Jain, Shekar, & Sharma, 2008) and as the cohort of authors for this volume have corroborated, teaching in South Asia is still dominated by reading directly from the textbook, having students follow along and repeat, and having students copy directly from the textbook into their notebooks. The haggard dusty spaces, the overwhelming numbers, and the teacher’s own experiences as a student continue to delimit their potential to alter and advance opportunities to learn.
The aims of teaching in South Asia, however, are changing. And this is presenting many challenges and opportunities for teachers. They are explicitly being told to engage their students, inspire them, and to teach through “constructivist” means in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India (Ministry of Human Resource and Development Agenda for Teacher Education, 2012; National Curriculum Framework, 2005; National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education, 2010). Teachers are being instructed to account for different learning styles, build confidence in students, and be reflective (i.e., during National Council of Educational Research & Training workshops 2010–2011). All of these duties are being put on to the teacher, in spite of the basics not even being understood in a way which might contribute to the teacher being comfortable with this new nuanced role, and as a result teachers struggle and continue to put children, and the nations they live in, at risk.
In order to help avoid aims and ambitions failure, we centered ourselves on practices and the ideas that inform them. The learning of teaching in and through practices is a way to expose teachers to explicated complex, ambitious teaching—minimize the risk—, and to open those practices up so that teachers are well equipped to selectively draw on them as needed (Britzman, 2012; Cohen, 2011; Lampert, 2001). When people learn practices, they enter a historically defined set of activities, developed over time by others. Dykstra (1991) defines practice as “participation in a cooperatively formed pattern of activity that emerges out of a complex tradition of interactions among many people sustained over a long period of time” (p. 43). Our own initiative, stems from U.S. academics Deborah Loewenberg Ball and David Cohen, whose 1999 work theorized a practice-based approach to professional development for teachers (Ball & Cohen, 1999).
Teaching teachers about practices, techniques, and moves is consequential so that teachers can move toward larger ideals. Their understanding of fundamental practices needs to be in place, so that they may move on to higher order practices that they can leverage for student learning, growth, and advancement. In short, practice-based teaching and practice-based teacher education consist of the most recent innovations in education that purport to help students become people of quality, creativity, and character.
Recent academic research in industrialized nations has shown widespread attention on practice (Ball and Cohen, 1999; Borko, Jacobs, & Koellner, 2010; Zeichner, 2012) and lead to a few fundamental questions for South Asia: Why aren’t some teachers and teacher educators drawn to practice-based teacher education? What is it that the field in South Asia knows about practice-based teaching and teacher education? And, in what ways and to what extent are teachers and teacher educators harnessing the potential that practice-based teaching affords in South Asia? We ask these questions because in spite of the great appeal of practice-based teaching and teacher education in other parts of the world, it seems the ideas haven’t been very well unpacked across the subcontinent. Two main driving questions orient the chapters in this volume: (1) What is the work involved in teaching students in South Asia? and (2) What kinds of opportunities to learn might the teaching of practice present for teacher-learners?
Why Focus on Practice?
As it turns out classroom teaching can be quite a complicated endeavor. Negotiating the interface between students, the teacher, and content is not a simple matter (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003). As researchers have shown, to teach in intellectually “ambitious” ways (Franke, Kazemi, & Battey, 2007; Lampert, Beasley, Ghousseini, Kazemi, & Franke, 2010; Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, & Stroupe, 2012) requires proficiency in subject‐matter knowledge (Ball & Wilson, 1996; Schwab, 1964, 1971), pedagogical knowledge (Shulman, 1986) pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987), and adaptive expertise (Bransford, Derry, Berliner, & Hammerness, 2005; Hatano & Inagaki, 1986).
To put these constructs into context, a sketch of the demands on Standard IX Social Studies teachers may help.1 In Standard IX Indian classrooms, teachers might need to teach about the spread of Buddhism in the ancient world. To do so, the teachers would need to have some basic subject-matter knowledge. They would need to know functional details—characters involved and places of note. And they would need to know more crucial ideas about interaction and historic modes of communication. They would need to know about the rigidity of ancient forerunners of Buddhism in order to contrast them with contemporary versions. They would need to know the debates between and the threats to the ancient spiritual practices. They would need to know how research has shifted extant perspectives on these topics as well. To be effective, the teachers would benefit from some pedagogical knowledge, too. They would need to know the subtle characteristics of each student, and have a broader sense of the common patterns of thinking of IX standard students, in order to leverage opportunities for them to not only know information, but also read carefully, identify themes, and write and talk persuasively about them. To generate student thinking the teacher would need to have some proficiency in pedagogical content knowledge. They would have to be able to draw from their subject-matter knowledge and their pedagogical knowledge and reformulate the content in terms, modes, and representations that fit well for their Standard IX students; being attentive all the time to their languages and cultures. They would need to be selective and thoughtful about the resources they deployed, in order to challenge assumptions and provide opportunities for students to question historical sources.
Then, they would have to marshal and mobilize all of this acquired knowledge and expertise skilfully as they enact a lesson. This would entail the teachers having practiced and honed routines that could facilitate and ease learning opportunities. They would need to organize time, space, materials, and students strategically and deliberately, and design sequences of lessons that provided opportunities for inquiry and discovery. The teachers would need ...